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In contrast to the Old Testament, the Qur'an does not
provide a unified description of the Creation. Instead of
a continuous narration, there are passages scattered all
over the Book which deal with certain aspects of the
Creation and provide information on the successive events
marking its development with varying degrees of detail.
To gain a clear idea of how these events are presented,
the fragments scattered throughout a large number of
suras have to be brought together.
This dispersal throughout the Book of references to
the same subject is not unique to the theme of the
Creation. Many important subjects are treated in the same
manner in the Qur'an: earthly or celestial phenomena, or
problems concerning man that are of interest to
scientists. For each of these themes, the same effort has
been made here to bring all the verses together.
For many European commentators, the description of the
Creation in the Qur'an is very similar to the one in the
Bible and they are quite content to present the two
descriptions side by side. I believe this concept is
mistaken because there are very obvious differences. On
subjects that are by no means unimportant from a
scientific point of view, we find statements in the
Qur'an whose equivalents we search for in vain in the
Bible. The latter contains descriptions that have no
equivalent in the Qur'an.
The obvious resemblances between the two texts are
well known; among them is the fact that, at first glance,
the number given to the successive stages of the Creation
is identical: the six days in the Bible correspond to the
six days in the Qur'an. In fact however, the problem is
more complex than this and it is worth pausing to examine
it.
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There is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever in the
Biblical [ The Biblical description mentioned here is taken
from the so-called Sacerdotal version discussed in the
first part of this work; the description taken from the
so-called Yahvist version has been compressed into the
space of a few lines in today s version of the Bible and
is too insubstantial to be considered here.] description of the Creation in six days
followed by a day of rest, the sabbath, analogous with
the days of the week. It has been shown how this mode of
narration practiced by the priests of the Sixth century
B.C. served the purpose of encouraging the people to
observe the sabbath. All Jews were expected to rest [ 'Sabbath' in Hebrew means 'to rest'.]
on the sabbath as the Lord had done after he had laboured
during the six days of the week.
The way the Bible interprets it, the word 'day' means
the interval of time between two successive sunrises or
sunsets for an inhabitant of the Earth. When defined in
this way, the day is conditioned by the rotation of the
Earth on its own axis. It is obvious that
logically-speaking there can be no question of 'days' as
defined just now, if the mechanism that causes them to appear-i.e. the existence of the Earth and its rotation
around the Sun-has not already been fixed in the early
stages of the Creation according to the Biblical
description. This impossibility has already been
emphasized in the first part of the present book.
When we refer to the majority of translations of the
Qur'an, we read that-analogous with the Biblical
description-the process of the Creation for the Islamic
Revelation also took place over a period of six days. It
is difficult to hold against the translators the fact
that they have translated the Arabic word by its most
common meaning. This is how it is usually expressed in
translations so that in the Qur'an, verse 54, sura 7
reads as follows:
"Your Lord is God Who created the heavens and the
earth in six days."
There are very few translations and commentaries of
the Qur'an that note how the word 'days' should really be
taken to mean 'periods'. It has moreover been maintained
that if the Qur'anic texts on the Creation divided its
stages into 'days', it was with the deliberate intention
of taking up beliefs held by all the Jews and Christians
at the dawn of Islam and of avoiding a head-on
confrontation with such a widely-held belief.
Without in any way wishing to reject this way of
seeing it, one could perhaps examine the problem a little
more closely and scrutinize in the Qur'an itself,
and more generally in the language of the time, the
possible meaning of the word that many translators
themselves still continue to translate by the word 'day' yaum,
plural ayyam in Arabic. [ See table on last page of present work for
equivalence between Latin and Arabic letters.]
Its most common meaning is 'day' but it must be
stressed that it tends more to mean the diurnal light
than the length of time that lapses between one day's
sunset and the next. The plural ayyam can mean,
not just 'days', but also 'long length of time', an
indefinite period of time (but always long). The meaning
'period of time' that the word contains is to he found
elsewhere in the Qur'an. Hence the following:
--sura 32, verse 5:
". . . in a period of time (yaum) whereof
the measure is a thousand years of your reckoning."
(It is to be noted that the Creation in six periods is
precisely what the verse preceding verse 5 refers to).
--sura 70, verse 4:
". . . in a period of time (yaum) whereof
the measure is 50,000 years."
The fact that the word , yaum' could mean a
period of time that was quite different from the period
that we mean by the word 'day' struck very early
commentators who, of course, did not have the knowledge
we possess today concerning the length of the stages in
the formation of the Universe. In the Sixteenth century
A.D. for example, Abu al Su'ud, who could not have had
any idea of the day as defined astronomically in terms of
the Earth's rotation, thought that for the Creation a
division must be considered that was not into days as we
usually understand the word, but into 'events' (in Arabic
nauba).
Modern commentators have gone back to this
interpretation. Yusuf Ali (1934), in his commentary on
each of the verses that deals with the stages in the
Creation, insists on the importance of taking the word,
elsewhere interpreted as meaning 'days', to mean in
reality 'very long Periods, or Ages, or Aeons'.
It is therefore possible to say that in the case of
the Creation of the world, the Qur'an allows for long
periods of time numbering six. It is obvious that modern
science has not permitted man to establish the fact that
the complicated stages in the process leading to the
formation of the Universe numbered six, but it has
clearly shown that long periods of time were involved
compared to which 'days' as we conceive them would be
ridiculous.
One of the longest passages of the
Qur'an, which deals
with the Creation, describes the latter by juxtaposing an
account of earthly events and one of celestial events.
The verses in question are verses 9 to 12, sura 41:
(God is speaking to the Prophet)
"Say. Do you disbelieve Him Who created the
earth in two periods? Do you ascribe equals to Him.
He is the Lord of the Worlds.
"He set in the (earth) mountains standing firm.
He blessed it.
He measured therein its sustenance in four periods,
in due proportion, in accordance with the needs of
those who ask for (sustenance? or information?).
"Moreover (tumma) He turned to heaven
when it was smoke and said to it and to the earth:
come willingly or unwillingly! They said: we come in
willing obedience.
"Then He ordained them seven heavens in two
periods, and He assigned to each heaven its mandate
by Revelation. And We adorned the lower heaven with
luminaries and provided it a guard. Such is the
decree of the All Mighty, the Full of
Knowledge."
These four verses of sura 41 contain several points to
which we shall return. the initially gaseous state of
celestial matter and the highly symbolic definition of
the number of heavens as seven. We shall see the meaning
behind this figure. Also of a symbolic nature is the
dialogue between God on the one hand and the primordial
sky and earth on the other. here however it is only to
express the submission of the Heavens and Earth, once
they were formed, to divine orders.
Critics have seen in this passage a contradiction with
the statement of the six periods of the Creation. By
adding the two periods of the formation of the Earth to
the four periods of the spreading of its sustenance to
the inhabitants, plus the two periods of the formation of
the Heavens, we arrive at eight periods. This would then
be in contradiction with the six periods mentioned above.
In fact however, this text, which leads man to reflect
on divine Omnipotence, beginning with the Earth and
ending with the Heavens, provides two sections that are
expressed by the Arabic word tumma', translated by
'moreover', but which also means 'furthermore' or 'then'.
The sense of a 'sequence' may therefore be implied
referring to a sequence of events or a series of man's
reflections on the events mentioned here. It may equally
be a simple reference to events juxtaposed without any
intention of bringing in the notion of the one following
the other. However this may be, the periods of the
Creation of the Heavens may just as easily coincide with
the two periods of the Earth's creation. A little later
we shall examine how the basic process of the formation
of the Universe is presented in the Qur'an and we shall
see how it can be jointly applied to the Heavens and the
Earth in keeping with modern ideas. We shall then realize
how perfectly reasonable this way is of conceiving the
simultaneous nature of the events here described.
There does not appear to be any contradiction between
the passage quoted here and the concept of the formation
of the world in six stages that is to be found in other
texts in the Qur'an.
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In the two passages from the Qur'an quoted above,
reference was made in one of the verses to the Creation
of the Heavens and the Earth (sura 7, verse 54) , and
elsewhere to the Creation of the Earth and the Heavens (sura 41, verses 9 to 12). The Qur'an does not therefore
appear to lay down a sequence for the Creation of the
Heavens and the Earth.
The number of verses in which the Earth is mentioned
first is quite small, e.g. sura 2, verse 29 and sura 20,
verse 4, where a reference is made to "Him Who
created the earth and the high heavens". The number
of verses where the Heavens are mentioned before the
Earth is, on the other hand, much larger: (sura 7, verse
54; sura 10, verse 3; sura 11, verse 7; sura 25, verse
59; sura 32, verse 4; sura 50, verse 38; sura 57, verse
4; sura 79, verses 27 to 33; sura 91, verses 5 to 10).
In actual fact, apart from sura 79, there is not a
single passage in the Qur'an that lays down a definite
sequence; a simple coordinating conjunction (wa)
meaning 'and' links two terms, or the word tumma
which, as has been seen in the above passage, can
indicate either a simple juxtaposition or a sequence.
There appears to me to be only one passage in the
Qur'an where a definite sequence is plainly established
between different events in the Creation. It is contained
in verses 27 to 33, sura 79:
"Are you the harder to create Or. is it the
heaven that (God) built? He raised its canopy and
fashioned it with harmony. He made dark the night and he
brought out the forenoon. And after that (ba' da
dalika) He spread it out. Therefrom he drew out its
water and its pasture. And the mountains He has fixed
firmly. Goods for you and your cattle."
This list of earthly gifts from God to man, which is
expressed In a language suited to farmers or nomads on
the Arabian Peninsula, is preceded by an invitation to
reflect on the creation of the heavens. The reference to
the stage when God spreads out the earth and renders it
arable is very precisely situated in time after the
alternating of night and day has been achieved. Two
groups are therefore referred to here, one of celestial
phenomena, and the other of earthly phenomena articulated
in time. The reference made here implies that the earth
must necessarily have existed before being spread out and
that it consequently existed when God created the
Heavens. The idea of a concomitance therefore
arises from the heavenly and earthly evolutions with the
interlocking of the two phenomena. Hence, one must not
look for any special significance in the reference in the
Qur'anic text to the Creation of the Earth before the
Heavens or the Heavens before the Earth: the position of
the words does not influence the order in which the
Creation took place, unless however it is specifically
stated.
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The Qur'an presents in two verses a brief synthesis of
the phenomena that constituted the basic process of the
formation of the Universe.
--sura 21, verse 30:
"Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and
the earth were joined together, then We clove them
asunder and We got every living thing out of the water.
Will they not then believe?"
--sura 41, verse 11. God orders the Prophet to speak
after inviting him to reflect on the subject of the
earth's creation:
"Moreover (God) turned to the Heaven when it was
smoke and said to it and to the earth . . ."
There then follow the orders to submit, referred to on
page 136.
We shall come back to the aquatic origins of life and
examine them along with other biological problems raised
by the Qur'an. The important things to remember at
present are the following. a) The statement of the
existence of a gaseous mass with fine particles, for this
is how the word 'smoke' (dukan in Arabic) is to be
interpreted. Smoke is generally made -up of a gaseous
substratum, plus, in more or less stable suspension, fine
particles that may belong to solid and even liquid states
of matter at high or low temperature;
b) The reference to a separation process (fatq)
of an primary single mass whose elements were initially
fused together (ratq). It must be noted that in
Arabic 'fatq' is the action of breaking,
diffusing, separating, and that 'ratq' is the
action of fusing or binding together elements to make a
homogenous whole.
This concept of the separation of a whole into several
parts is noted in other passages of the Book with
reference to multiple worlds. The first verse of the
first sura in the Qur'an proclaims, after the opening
invocation, the following: "In the name of God, the
Beneficent, the Merciful", "Praise be to God,
Lord of the Worlds."
The terms 'worlds' reappears dozens of times in the
Qur'an. The Heavens are referred to as multiple as well,
not only on account of their plural form, but also
because of their symbolic numerical quantity. 7.
This number is used 24 times throughout the Qur'an for
various numerical quantities. It often carries the
meaning of 'many' although we do not know exactly why
this meaning of the figure was used. The Greeks and
Romans also seem to have used the number 7 to mean an
undefined idea of plurality. In the Qur'an, the number 7
refers to the Heavens themselves (samawat). It
alone is understood to mean 'Heavens'. The 7 roads of the
Heavens are mentioned once:
--sura 2, verse 29:
"(God) is the One Who created for you all that is on
the earth. Moreover He turned to the heaven and fashioned
seven heavens with harmony. He is Full of Knowledge of
all things."
--sura 23, verse 17:
"And We have created above you seven paths. We have
never been unmindful of the Creation."
--sura 67, verse 3:
"(God) is the One Who created seven heavens one
above an other. Thou canst see no fault in the creation
of the Beneficent. Turn the vision again! Canst thou see
any rift?"
--sura 71, verse 15-16:
"Did you see how God created seven heavens one above
another and made the moon a light therein and made the
sun a lamp? [ It is to be noted that while the Bible calls both
Sun and Moon 'lights', here, as always in the Qur'an,
they are differently named; the first is called 'Light' (nur)
and the second is compared in this verse to a 'lamp (siraj)
producing light'. We shall see later how other epithets
are applied to the Sun.]"
--sura 78, verse 12:
"We have built above you seven strong (heavens) and
placed a blazing lamp."
Here the blazing lamp is the Sun.
The commentators on the Qur'an are in agreement on all
these verses: the number 7 means no more than plurality. [ Apart from the Qur'an, we often find the number 7
meaning plurality in texts from Muhammad's time, or from
the first centuries following him, which record his words (hadiths).]
There are therefore many Heavens and Earths, and it
comes as no small surprise to the reader of the Qur'an to
find that earths such as our own may be found in the
Universe, a fact that has not yet been verified by man in
our time.
Verse 12 of sura 65 does however predict the
following:
"God is the One Who created seven heavens and of the
earth (ard) a similar number. The Command descends
among them so that you know that God has power over all
things and comprehends all things in His knowledge."
Since 7 indicates an indefinite plurality (as we have
seen), it is possible to conclude that the Qur'anic text
clearly indicates the existence of more than one single
Earth, our own Earth (ard); there are others like
it in the Universe.
Another observation which may surprise the Twentieth
century reader of the Qur'an is the fact that verses
refer to three groups of things created, i.e.
--things in the Heavens.
--things on the Earth
--things between the Heavens and the Earth
Here are several of these verses:
--sura 20, verse 6;
"To Him (God) belongs what is in the heavens, on
earth, between them and beneath the soil."
--sura 25, verse 59:
". . . the One Who created the heavens, the earth
and what is between them in six periods."
--sura 32, verse 4:
"God is the One Who created the heavens, the earth
and what is between them in six periods."
--sura 50, verse 38:
"We created the heavens, the earth .and what is
between them in six periods, and no weariness touched
Us." [ This statement that the Creation did not make God
at all weary stands out as an obvious reply to the
Biblical description, referred to in the first part of
the present book, where God is said to have rested on the
seventh day from the preceding days' work!]
The reference in the Qur'an to 'what is between the
Heavens and the Earth' is again to be found in the
following verses: sura 21, verse 16; sura 44, verses 7
and 38 ; sura 78, verse 37; sura 15, verse 85; sura 46,
verse 3; sura 43, Verse 85.
This Creation outside the Heavens and outside the
Earth, mentioned several times, is a priori difficult to
imagine. To understand these verses, reference must be
made to the most recent human observations on the
existence of cosmic extra-galactic material and one must
indeed go back to ideas established by contemporary
science on the formation of the Universe, starting with
the simplest and proceeding to the most complex. These
are the subject of the following paragraph.
Before passing on to these purely scientific matters
however, it is advisable to recapitulate the main points
on which the Qur'an gives us information about the
Creation. According to the preceding quotations, they are
as follows:
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Existence of six periods for the Creation in
general.
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Interlocking of stages in the Creation of the Heavens
and the Earth.
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Creation of the Universe out of an initially unique
mass forming a block that subsequently split up.
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Plurality of the Heavens and of the Earths.
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Existence of an intermediary creation 'between the
Heavens and the Earth'.
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The Earth and planets rotating around the Sun
constitute an organized world of dimensions which, to our
human scale, appear quite colossal. The Earth is, after
all, roughly 93 million miles from the Sun. This is a
very great distance for a human being, but it is very
small in comparison to the distance separating the Sun
from the furthermost planet from it in the solar system
(Pluto); in round numbers it is 40 times the distance
from the Earth to the Sun, i.e. approximately 3,672
million miles away. This distance, when doubled,
represents the largest dimension of our solar system. The
Sun's light takes nearly 6 hours to reach Pluto, and yet
the journey is made at the terrifying speed of over
186,000 miles per second. The light coming from stars on
the very confines of the known celestial world therefore
takes billions of years to reach us.
The Sun, of which we are a satellite like the other
planets surrounding it, is itself an infinitesmally small
element among a hundred billion stars that form a whole,
called a galaxy. On a fine summer night, the whole of
space seems to be filled with stars that make up what is
known as the Milky Way. This group has extremely large
dimensions. Whereas light could cross the solar system in
units of one hour, it would require something like 90,000
years to go from one extreme to the other of the most
compact group of stars that make up our galaxy.
The galaxy that we belong to however, even though it
is so incredibly huge, is only a small part of the
Heavens. There are giant agglomerates of stars similar to
the Milky Way that lie outside our galaxy. They were
discovered a little over fifty years ago, when astronomy
was able to make use of an optical instrument as
sophisticated as the one that made possible the
construction of the Mount Wilson telescope in the United
States. Thus a very large number indeed of isolated
galaxies and masses of galaxies have been discovered that
are so far away that it was necessary to institute a
special unit of light-years, the 'parsec' (the distance
light travels in 3.26 years at 186,000 miles per second).
What was there originally in the immensely large space
the galaxies now occupy? Modern science can only answer
this question as of a certain period in the evolution of
the Universe; it cannot put into numbers the length of
time that separates this period from us.
At the earliest time it can provide us with, modern
science has every reason to maintain that the Universe
was formed of a gaseous mass principally composed of
hydrogen and a certain amount of helium that was slowly
rotating. This nebula subsequently split up into multiple
fragments with very large dimensions and masses, so large
indeed, that specialists in astrophysics are able to
estimate their mass from 1 to 100 billion times the
present mass of the Sun (the latter represents a mass
that is over 300,000 times that of the Earth). These
figures give an idea of the large size of the fragments
of primary gaseous mass that were to give birth to the
galaxies.
A new fragmentation was to form the stars. There then
followed the intervention of a condensing process where
gravitational forces came into play, (since these bodies
were moving and rotating more and more quickly), along
with pressures and the influence of magnetic fields and
of radiations. The stars became shiny as they contracted
and transformed the gravitational forces into thermal
energy. Thermonuclear reactions came into play, and
heavier atoms were formed by fusion at the expense of
others that were lighter; this is how the transition was
made from hydrogen to helium, then to carbon and oxygen,
ending with metals and metalloids. Thus the stars have a
life of their own and modern astronomy classifies them
according to their present stage of evolution. The stars
also have a death; in the final stage of their evolution,
the violent implosion of certain stars has been observed
so that they become veritable 'corpses'.
The planets, and in particular the Earth, originated
in a separation process starting from an initial
constituent that in the beginning was the primary nebula.
A fact that has no longer been contested for over
twenty-five years is that the Sun condensed inside the
single nebula and that the planets did the same inside
the surrounding nebular. disc. One must stress-and this
is of prime importance for. the subject in hand-that
there was no sequence in the formation of the celestial
elements such as the Sun nor in the formation of an
earthly. element. There is an evolutionary parallelism
with the identity of origin.
Here, science can give us information on the period
during which the events just mentioned took place. Having
estimated the age of our galaxy at roughly ten billion
years, according to this hypothesis, the formation of the
solar. system took place a little over five billion years
later'. The study of natural radio activity makes it
possible to place the age of the Earth and the time the
Sun was formed at 4.5 billion years ago, to within a
present-day accuracy of 100 million years, according to
some scientists' calculations. This accuracy is to be
admired, since 100 million years may represent a long
time to us but the ratio 'maximum error/total
time-to-be-measured' is 0.1/4.5, i.e. 2.2%.
Specialists in astrophysics have therefore attained a
high degree of knowledge concerning the general process
involved in the formation of the solar system. It may be
summarized as follows: condensation and contraction of a
rotating gaseous mass, splitting up into fragments that
leave the Sun. and planets in their places, among them
the Earth. [ As regards the Moon, its gradual separation from
the Earth following the deceleration of its rotation is
an acknowledged probability.] The knowledge that science has gained on
the primary nebula and the way it split up into an
incommensurable quantity of stars grouped into galaxies
leaves absolutely no doubt as to the legitimacy of a
concept of the plurality of worlds. It does not however
provide any kind of certainty concerning the existence in
the Universe of anything that might, either closely or
vaguely, resemble the Earth.
In spite of the above, modern specialists in
astrophysics consider it highly likely that planets
similar to Earth are present in the Universe. As far as
the solar system is concerned, nobody seriously
entertains the possibility of finding general conditions
similar to those on Earth on another planet in this
system. We must therefore seek for them outside the solar
system. The likelihood of their existing outside it is
considered quite probable for the following reasons:
It is thought that in our galaxy half of the 100
billion stars must, like the Sun, have a planetary
system. The fifty billion stars do indeed, like the Sun,
rotate very slowly. a characteristic which suggests that
they are surrounded by planets that are their satellites.
These stars are so far away that the possible planets are
unobservable, but their existence is thought to be highly
probable on account of certain trajectory characteristics
; a slight undulation of the star's trajectory indicates
the presence of a companion planetary satellite. Thus the
Barnard Star probably has at least one planetary
companion with a mass greater than that of Jupiter and
may even have two satellites. As P. Guérin writes:
"All the evidence points to the fact that planetary
systems are scattered in profusion all over the universe.
The solar system and the Earth are not unique." And
as a corollary. "Life, like the planets that harbour
it, is scattered throughout the universe, in those places
where the physico-chemical conditions necessary for its
flowering and development are to be found."
The basic process in the formation of the Universe
therefore lay in the condensation of material in the
primary nebula followed by its division into fragments
that originally constituted galactic masses. The latter
in their turn split up into stars that provided the
sub-product of the process, i.e. the planets. These
successive separations left among the groups of principle
elements what one might perhaps call 'remains'. Their
more scientific name is 'interstellar galactic material'.
It has been described in various ways; there are bright
nebulae that reflect the light received from other stars
and are perhaps composed of 'dusts' or 'smokes', to use
the terminology of experts in astrophysics, and then
there are the dark nebulae that are less dense,
consisting of interstellar material that is even more
modest, known for its tendency to interfere with
photometric measurements in astronomy. There can be no
doubt about the existence of 'bridges' of material
between the galaxies themselves. Although these gases may
be very rarefied, the fact that they occupy such a
colossal space, in view of the great distance separating
the galaxies, could make them correspond to a mass
possibly greater than the total mass of the galaxies in
spite of the low density of the former. A. Boichot
considers the presence of these intergalactic masses to
be of prime importance which could "considerably
alter ideas on the evolution of the Universe."
We must now go back to the basic ideas on the Creation
of the Universe that were taken from the Qur'an and look
at them in the light of modern scientific data.
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We shall examine the five main points on which the
Qur'an gives information about the Creation.
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The six periods of the Creation of the Heavens and the
Earth covered, according to the Qur'an, the formation of
the celestial bodies and the Earth, and the development
of the latter until (with its 'sustenance') it became
inhabitable by man. In the case of the Earth, the events
described in the Qur'an happened over four periods. One
could perhaps see in them the four geological periods
described by modern science, with man's appearance, as we
already know, taking place in the quaternary era. This is
purely a hypothesis since nobody has an answer to this
question.
It must be noted however, that the formation of the
heavenly bodies and the Earth, as explained in verses 9
to 12, sura 41 (see page 136) required two phases. If we
take the Sun and its subproduct the Earth as an example
(the only one accessible to us), science informs us that
their formation occurred by a process of condensation of
the primary nebula and then their separation. This is
exactly what the Qur'an expresses very clearly when it
refers to the processes that produced a fusion and
subsequent separation starting from a celestial 'smoke'.
Hence there is complete correspondence between the facts
of the Qur'an and the facts of science.
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Science showed the interlocking of the two stages
in the formation of a star (like the Sun) and its
satellite (like the Earth). This interconnection is
surely very evident in the text of the Qur'an examined.
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The existence at an early stage of the Universe of
the 'smoke' referred to in the Qur'an, meaning the predominantly gaseous state of the material that composes
it, obviously corresponds to the concept of the primary
nebula put forward by modern science.
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The plurality of the heavens, expressed in the
Qur'an by the number 7, whose meaning we have discussed,
is confirmed by modern science due to the observations
experts in astrophysics have made on galactic systems and
their very large number. On the other hand the plurality
of earths that are similar to ours (from certain points
of view at least) is an idea that arises in the text of
the Qur'an but has not yet been demonstrated to be true
by science; all the same, specialists consider this to be
quite feasible.
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The existence of an intermediate creation between
'the Heavens' and 'the Earth' expressed in the Qur'an may
be compared to the discovery of those bridges of material
present outside organized astronomic systems.
Although not all the questions raised by the
descriptions in the Qur'an have been completely confirmed
by scientific data, there is in any case absolutely no
opposition between the data in the Qur'an on the Creation
and modern knowledge on the formation of the Universe.
This fact is worth stressing for the Qur'anic Revelation,
whereas it is very obvious indeed that the present-day
text of the Old Testament provides data on the same
events that are unacceptable from a scientific point of
view. It is hardly surprising, since the description of
the Creation in the Sacerdotal version of the Bible [ This text completely overshadows the few lines
contained in the Yahvist version. The latter is too brief
and too vague for the scientist to take account of it.] was written by priests at the time of the deportation to
Babylon who had the legalist intentions already described
and therefore compiled a description that fitted their
theological views. The existence of such an enormous
difference between the Biblical description and the data
in the Qur'an concerning the Creation is worth
underlining once again on account of the totally
gratuitous accusations leveled against Muhammad since the
beginnings of Islam to the effect that he copied the
Biblical descriptions. As far as the Creation is
concerned, this accusation is totally unfounded. How
could a man living fourteen hundred years ago have made
corrections to the existing description to such an extent
that he eliminated scientifically inaccurate material
and, on his own initiative, made statements that science
has been able to verify only in the present day? This
hypothesis is completely untenable. The description of
the Creation given in the Qur'an is quite different from
the one in the Bible.
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Indisputably, resemblances do exist between narrations
dealing with other subjects, particularly religious
history, in the Bible and in the Qur'an. It is moreover
interesting to note from this point of view how nobody
holds against Jesus the fact that he takes up the same
sort of facts and Biblical teachings. This does not, of
course, stop people in the West from accusing Muhammad of
referring to such facts in his teaching with the
suggestion that he is an imposter because he presents
them as a Revelation. As for the proof that Muhammad
reproduced in the Qur'an what he had been told or
dictated by the rabbis, it has no more substance than the
statement that a Christian monk gave him a sound
religious education. One would do well to re-read what R.
Blachère in his book, The Problem of Muhammad (Le
Problème de Mahomet) [ Pub. Presses Universitaries de France, Paris,
1952.], has to say about this 'fable'.
A hint of a resemblance is also advanced between other
statements in the Qur'an and beliefs that go back a very
long way, probably much further in time than the Bible.
More generally speaking, the traces of certain
cosmogonic myths have been sought in the Holy Scriptures;
for example the belief held by the Polynesians in the
existence of primeval waters that were covered in
darkness until they separated when light appeared; thus
Heaven and Earth were formed. This myth is compared to
the description of the Creation in the Bible, where there
is undoubtedly a resemblance. It would however be
superficial to then accuse the Bible of having copied
this from the cosmogonic myth.
It is just as superficial to see the Qur'anic concept
of the division of the primeval material constituting the
Universe at its initial stage-a concept held by modern
science-as one that comes from various cosmogonic myths
in one form or another that express something resembling
it.
It is worth analysing these mythical beliefs and
descriptions more closely. Often an initial idea appears
among them which is reasonable in itself, and is in some
cases borne out by what we today know (or think we know)
to be true, except that fantastic descriptions are
attached to it in the myth. This is the case of the
fairly widespread concept of the Heavens and the Earth
originally being united then subsequently separated.
When, as in Japan, the image of the egg plus an
expression of chaos is attached to the above with the
idea of a seed inside the egg (as for all. eggs), the
imaginative addition makes the concept lose all semblance
of seriousness. In other countries, the idea of a plant
is associated with it; the plant grows and in so doing
raises up the sky and separates the Heavens from the
Earth. Here again, the imaginative quality of the added
detail lends the myth its very distinctive character.
Nevertheless a common characteristic remains, i.e. the
notion of a single mass at the beginning of the
evolutionary process leading to the formation of the
Universe which then divided to form the various 'worlds.
that we know today.
The reason these cosmogonic myths are mentioned here
is to underline the way they have been embroidered by
man's imagination and to show the basic difference
between them and the statements in the Qur'an on the same
subject. The latter are free from any of the whimsical
details accompanying such beliefs; on the contrary, they
are distinguished by the sober quality of the words in
which they are made and their agreement with scientific
data.
Such statements in the Qur'an concerning the Creation,
which appeared nearly fourteen centuries ago, obviously
do not lend themselves to a human explanation.
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